The fact that Scieffort[13] committed suicide a few days later was regarded as a fulfilment of this prophecy, which from the strange manner and appearance of the mysterious person who uttered it produced a deep impression. At once all Leipsic began to ring with the name of Count Cagliostro and his gift of prophecy. It was his first step on the road to fame. “On leaving the city,” says the Inquisition-biographer, “not only did his admirers pay his hotel bill, but they presented him with a considerable sum of money.”
Henceforth, wherever he went he was sure of a cordial reception in the lodges of the Order of Strict Observance. By the Freemasons of Dantzic and Königsberg he appears to have been treated as a person of great distinction. As the lodges of the Order in these cities were wholly given up to the practice and study of occult phenomena he must, no doubt, have furnished them with some proof of his possession of “supernatural” faculties.
In this way, recommended from lodge to lodge, he reached Mittau, the capital of the Duchy of Courland, in March 1779. Here the cloud of uncertainty in which he had been enveloped since leaving England was completely dispelled.
II
Now one does not go to Courland without a reason, and a powerful one. Marshal Saxe, the only other celebrity one recalls in connection with this bleak, marshland duchy of Germanized Letts on the Baltic, was lured thither by its crown. Cagliostro too had his reason—which was not Saxe’s; though the ridiculous Inquisition-biographer, remembering that the crown of Courland had been worn by more than one adventurer within the memory of the generation then living, declares that there was a project to depose the reigning duke and put Cagliostro in his place.
As a matter of fact, Cagliostro went to Courland to further his great scheme of founding the Order of Egyptian Masonry. This was the thought uppermost in his mind from the time he left England, or at least the one most frequently expressed.
The idea of Egyptian Masonry is said to have been suggested to him by some unpublished manuscripts that he purchased while in London. He himself, on the contrary, professed to have conceived it in Egypt during his travels in the East, of which he gave such an amazing account at his trial in the Diamond Necklace Affair. It is the spirit, however, in which the idea was conceived that is of chief importance, and this seems to have been wholly creditable to him.
For in spite of the vanity and ostentation he exhibited when his star was in the ascendant Cagliostro, whose “bump of benevolence” was highly developed, was inspired with a genuine enthusiasm for the cause of humanity. Egyptian Masonry had for its aim the moral regeneration of mankind. As the revelations made to men by the Creator (of whom he never failed to speak with the profoundest respect) had, in his opinion, been altered to subserve their own purposes by the prophets, apostles, and fathers of the Church, the regeneration of mankind was only to be accomplished by restoring the knowledge of God in all its purity. This Cagliostro professed was only to be effected by Egyptian Masonry, which he declared had been founded by the patriarchs, whom he regarded as the last and sole depositaries of the truth, as the means of communicating with the invisible world.
That he really believed it was his mission to re-establish this communication there can be no doubt. Even Carlyle’s conception of him as a “king of liars” only serves to emphasize this. For since it is generally admitted that the habitual liar is in the end persuaded of the truth of what he says, there is no reason why the “king” of the tribe should be an exception. Had Cagliostro, therefore, in the beginning known that the religion he preached was a lie—of which I can find no evidence whatever—he was most certainly convinced of its truth in the end. In France, where his following was most numerous, the delegates of the French lodges, after hearing him, declared in their report that they had seen in him “a promise of truth which none of the great masters had so completely developed before.”
If it be true that a man’s works are the key to his character, nothing reveals that of Cagliostro more clearly than his system of Egyptian Masonry. Never did the welfare of humanity, sublimest of ideals, find more ridiculous expression. But to describe in detail the astonishing galimathias of this system for the regeneration of mankind would be as tedious as it is unnecessary, and the following rough outline must serve to illustrate the constitution and ceremonies of the Egyptian Rite.